Lonely days and lonely nights

For whatever reason, I've been doing a lot of dreaming lately. I've read that means I'm getting good rest, but I dreamed a lot last night and I didn't get much rest all night, continually waking up.

I suspect what started last night's dreamathon was a sentence by my boss at a gathering we had for dinner in Lake Charles. He was talking to us about what we do, ministers and spouses, when he said, "This is a lonely job."

I hadn't thought much of that before, and didn't really think much of it on the way home, but during the night, my subconscious certainly did.

I dreamed I had been given a job as the managing editor of the Reno Gazette-Journal, a newspaper I worked at 30 years ago this year. Apparently I had worked at the newspaper two times before and left each time because it was so far from home and I was so lonely.

So, the editor or publisher of the paper brought in friends to make me feel more at home (it's a dream, remember). The friends they brought in were from previous churches I've served, friends I miss to this very minute, though truthfully we were never really, really close. But I miss them all the same.

A man I served under years ago as an associate pastor told me that you could not be friends with the persons you're ministering to because you can't be their pastor if you're their friend. I actually thought he was crazy, but as I've grown older and deeper into the ministry I have begun to understand a bit of what he meant (maybe, or maybe he's crazy -- I'm still debating that).

We serve, we listen, we do but through it all we can't really, really become close because in the system in which I operate, I might be gone in June. I know now I wasn't really emotionally prepared for such a happenstance when it occurred this past June. I hadn't ever moved in that fashion, across the state, 3 hours from my girls, and it has been a real, real eye-opener.

Truthfully, I don't meet people easily or well, and not knowing anyone of the clergy to speak of or not knowing anyone, and I mean anyone, of the three churches has taken time and effort on my part to do this. There are times when I feel I'm completely on my own, when my creativity can only take me so far, when the ideas won't come and it doesn't seem we're progressing any longer. I look around and see a plateau -- again -- that a church must fight through. And I get tired of the effort.

Bottom line is in the dream I took the job. In reality, I took the job. No one, not a person, told me it would be easy. From the beginning, in fact, they said it wouldn't be. There are moments of exquisite joy, and there are moments when I feel as if I've been swallowed whole by Job's great fish.

Lord, give me your heart for the ones forgotten, for the lonely, for the ones who find joy so difficult to come by naturally.

And let us all continue to dream.